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The Music Box Theatre is celebrating its 75th anniversary next week. One of the great theaters in Chicago, it has presented movies for most of its 75-year history, with only a six-year period in the late '70s and early '80s when it fell into disuse. Not that it's always presented its current mix of foreign, independent, and repertory programming. For much of its history, it showed second-run Hollywood features. The studio-owned houses had exclusive rights to the first-run screenings until the '50s, so independent theaters like the Music Box had to wait. But even after the studios' vertical integration was broken up, the Music Box continued to program second-run features. The decline of movie audiences in the '50s and '60s hit the Music Box as well, and it showed, as the quality of programming went south. According to the Music Box's informative website, "it slipped into a sleazy $1.50 grind house policy showing last year's films ... in its declining years."

That all changed in 1983 when Robert Chaney and Christopher Carlo bought the theater and helped restore it to its former grandeur. They also began showing repertory films--the great Hollywood classics--in a perfectly appropriate setting. As the years went by, they added first-run foreign films, along with American independent features and documentaries. Today, the Music Box screens a gloriously eclectic mix of movies for Chicago's vast audience.

I was talking with my friend Garth last week about how we watch movies. Much of the country, of course, doesn't have access to something like the Music Box. If they're lucky, their local multi-plex reserves one screen for arthouse fare. The only way they can see anything foreign or classic is to head down to their local video store. That's true even for cinephiles; an entire generation of film-buffs has grown up thinking the way you see movies is on the small screen.

This is a shame for so many reasons. Even if your home theater system is state-of-the-art, it still can't compare to seeing something on a big screen like the Music Box has. There's something fundamentally different about video. It doesn't have the same sharpness, the same fluidity that film exhibits. Also, the experience of "going to" the movies creates a different atmosphere. You can't just pause the dvd player and go to the kitchen. Instead, the movie theater allows you to lose yourself in the world on screen. That's especially true at the Music Box, with its marvelous lobby, which makes you feel as if you've stepped into some different world, and the theater's ceiling, with the floating "clouds" and twinkling "stars."

But the real loss in watching movies at home is that you don't experience them with other people. Even if you invite a few friends over, it's not the same as sitting in a huge room of several hundred people laughing uproariously or shivering with fear. There's something communal about a movie theater. We're not only transported into a different world, we're transported *together*. I'll never forget a Saturday matinee at the Music Box when I saw the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. The theater was full of young couples, families, grandfathers with their grandsons, and college friends. And we all laughed and laughed at Groucho's non sequiturs and Harpo's antics. The marvelous mirror scene practically brought the house down. I had the same experience the first time I saw Singing in the Rain with a packed Music Box crowd. When you're laughing with other people, you're reminded of what you have in common, that you're not alone in this world but that other people are somehow like you.

That's true for other kinds of films as well. I saw Kieslowski's Red for the first time at the Music Box, and the buzz in the lobby afterwards was remarkable. In fact, the number of great dramas I've seen at the Music Box would fill several columns. I distinctly remember catching City of Lost Children on a New Year's Day matinee and 2001 in 70mm. I saw a spectacular double feature of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief and Hal Hartley's brilliant Henry Fool. Even my bad Music Box experiences have been memorable. One night I was watching Brazil with some friends, and a drunk woman three rows in front of us vomited in her chair. The unmistakable odor somehow fit with Terry Gilliam's dystopic fantasy.

Hopefully, that won't occur at next week's screening of Brazil. To celebrate their 75th anniversary, the Music Box is presenting three wonderful days of movies. The first night--Tuesday, September 7--is Audience Choice Day. Over the last several weeks, audience members have filled out ballots for what films they'd like to see. The winners are: the restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and the director's cut of Brazil. Die-hards can see all three movies for $8.75. The next night will be two presentations of the Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz. Then on Thursday, September 9, the Music Box will take us back to 1929 with another triple feature. First up is Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, then Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade, and finally the Marx Brothers in Cocoanuts. The price for each movie is only 75 cents.

Even if you don't have a chance to participate in the festivities, I hope you'll take advantage of Chicago's rich cinematic offerings. We're so fortunate to have not only the Music Box but the Gene Siskel Film Center, Facets Cinematheque, Doc Films, and a whole host of arthouse theaters. My own film history would've been impossible without these great resources, and I hope the same is true for you. Here's to the Music Box and hopefully another 75 wonderful years.